[ITT] We spend the next few hours recovering my laptop.

The answer to these threads should always be:

-format c:
-Restore files from external drive
-Update a few drivers and run Windows patches
-be back up and running in under an hour
 
Well that's handy, my local Staples had 16gb flash drives on sale for $18

THAT'S ONLY A LITTLE MORE THAN A DOLLAR A GIGABYTE

unless we're talking US$ because $18 Canadian is like $500 United States money these days
 
unbiased answer here
given obibun's technical knowledge per this thread, he should stay away from linux unless he just wants to use the system for web surfing. and even then I'd have some reservations. driver issues are a bitch and forget gaming on it.
 
Obibun said:
Because it's been like two months now since I was able to use my good gaming laptop and I'd like to begin gaming again.

It suffered some sort of massive internal failure, I'm 95% willing to bet on some system-destroying virus I picked up while trying to learn how to use cookies/etc. to break download/upload site premium codes

I started getting a few error messages and after that stuff just kind of started disappearing from the desktop, as though it was being deleted, and then it just plain stopped working. so I shut it off and resolved to go in and recover my old photos and etc. before giving it a proper format.

So as I understand my options are: A) MS DART B) Get one of my friends to help.

Now MS DART seems rather straightforward, however all references to it insist on a bootable CD (ERD Commander? or something) but I have no way to make one of these. It'd be about 10x easier to make it from a bootable USB.

My question here, at this point, is first where the fuck can I find MSDART as a usb-bootable program and when I do boot it, will I still be able to plug in an external hard drive and use it to take the photos off?

I've looked around a bit for a USB-bootable version of MSDART but it's all just forums full of people telling you how to make it manually. I find it super hard to believe that somebody hasn't made an end user version.

We can start from there and I'll obviously be at this for a few hours.
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Rayn said:
unbiased answer here
given obibun's technical knowledge per this thread, he should stay away from linux unless he just wants to use the system for web surfing. and even then I'd have some reservations. driver issues are a bitch and forget gaming on it.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's basically the impression I got. I'm sure I could get into it but the amount of effort it takes versus the payoff (especially when all I want to do is game) is pretty low
 
Obibun said:
Yeah, that's basically the impression I got. I'm sure I could get into it but the amount of effort it takes versus the payoff (especially when all I want to do is game) is pretty low
Click to expand...
Run Linux in a full screen VM and get in the habit of using that as your primary means of dicking around on the intertubes. Then when you feel like playing a game, close down the VM and play your Hoyle Card Games or whatever it is that you kids are playing these days.
 
So I've finally got an installation of Vista bootable on a USB key and I'm sitting here looking at the installation.

It's saying, derp what drive

NO DRIVES WERE FOUND

wtf are you shitting me?

so I loaded up Ubuntu and just to be safe formatted both in Ubuntu, NTFS, but they're still not showing up

ideas?
 
update: I'm looking at it in Disk Manager and the drives are very clearly there, two 500GB hard disks

I tried formating it in Disk Manager, each drive individually, as "Master Boot Record", only for it to tell me, orry, the device is busy.

Details say:

One or more block devices are holding /dev/sbd

hrm?
 
this has got to be obi's greatest troll thread ever... if he really didn't know anything about linux or ubuntu like a normal non tech person, he would avoid it like the plague. not actively try to install and run them as os's
 
Anyway, any which way I try to format the drives/volumes to clean them out it keeps mentioning them being busy because of some "block devices" or whatever, and it's always a dev/xx extension

Even trying to mess with the HDD as one "unit" (984GB listed), I can't format it. I get Operation Failed

BLKRRPART ioctl failed for /dev/dm-2: invalid argument

creating a partition gives me:

Error doing BLKPG ioctl with BLKPG_ADD_PARTITION for partition 1 of size 32256 at offset 9884483730944 on /dev/dm-2: Invalid argument
 
Can someone who understands the basics of HDDs and formatting/partitioning explain to me why it won't let me even format or partition my drives? This is so weird to me.

Data - what I'm doing is trying to give my drives a decent format, because they were completely indetectable by my Vista install even though I could go through them in Ubuntu.

So trying to format them properly outside of the Vista installation (which doesn't see them) gives me all these problems. You think it'd be easy just to be like WIPE THIS SHIT CLEAN, but no. Not only is it hidden from my Windows install, it also won't let me format and/or partition them.

Something's up.
 
Go to the website for the drive's manufacturer and dload their drive utilities, use that to format the drive
 
From what I can gather, you formatted them NTFS from Ubuntu?

Is that what you did?
 
Well, apparently the data's no longer there. So I got somewhere.

Why aren't these drives/partitions showing up in my Vista install? And why can't I just re-format and re-partition them?
 
Yes, Ubuntu has this Disk util that basically allows you to format and partition the drives in whichever filesystem you want. Being the clever duck I am, because I know Windows runs on NTFS, I am attempting to re-format them as an NTFS filesystem.

But it's not letting me do anything and is being generally confusing.
 
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